Posts Tagged ‘Bond Market’

Either way (hike or no hike), there is no place for the gold bull to hide. It took gold approximately 7 months to advance $250 and overcome major resistance at $1,300/oz from a bottom of $1,050. A reasonable target could be $1,550/oz ($1,300 + $250) by March 2017 – 7 months from now. Silver could follow a similar pattern with a near-term target of $26/oz.

What needs to be considered is the future – that is riddled with uncertainty. What we do know, is that the growing negative sentiment towards our governments that have failed us both politically and economically, presents a need to safeguard wealth from the tides ahead. If you haven’t yet included gold in your portfolios, now is the time to do it.

If everyone is getting out of the dollar, and all of these other currencies are in negative interest rates, and you’re in positive, where do you think the money’s going to flow? The biggest trade out there will be shorting the US debt market. Right now what you want to do is you is you want to short bonds and go long gold. As for silver, it’s going to go in the financial record books.

In his latest communication with the outside world, Jeff Gundlach said that gold prices are likely to reach $1400 an ounce “as investors lose faith in central banks. “The evidence that negative rates are harmful and not helpful has piled up to the point that the ‘In Central Banks We Trust’ mantra has finally been laid bare as a hoax,” Gundlach said.

It appears the mainstream is beginning to recognize that something very strange is going on in debt markets. Whatever the reason, the severity of the distortions is unnerving many investors. The big question remains whether there is “something bigger brewing under the surface that so far hasn’t been pinpointed yet.”

European stocks are crashing, Chinese stocks are crashing, and commodities are crashing. And guess what? All of those things happened before U.S. stocks crashed in the fall of 2008 too. In so many ways, it seems like we are watching a replay of the financial crisis of 2008, but this time around the world is in far worse shape financially.

Most of us are investors, one way or another – bonds, stocks, real estate, etc. Purchasing power of those assets is dependent upon the value of underlying currencies. A crash would hurt all of those investments. What insurance have you purchased to protect against a stock or bond market crash, or a dollar crash? Buy Gold.

The global bond bubble has ballooned to over $76 trillion & interest rates have never been lower in modern history. There is literally nowhere for the bond market to go except for the other direction, and when this bull market turns into a bear it will create chaos and financial devastation all over the planet.

ECB is now close to running out of ammunition. Contrary to its initial design, the OMT programme could no longer be seen as unlimited. Draghi is already playing down Q€’s potential, noting that QE alone will not be sufficient to reignite eurozone growth. It seems the only option for the ECB would be to plunge further into NIRP-dom.

If the Fed raises rates, I would expect for the US economy to come close to a recession, more deflation & probably some disruption in equity markets. If they don’t raise rates as the decision is data-dependent & it’s coming in weak – you might actually see stocks higher at the end of the year than they are now based on more free money.

Oil and natural gas exploration and extraction via fracking or hydraulic fracturing is a highly capital-intensive venture. Given the tentative strategy of the Federal Reserve in raising the benchmark interest rate, a sudden and unexpected increase in borrowing costs for businesses in the high-yield debt space is a serious cause for concern.

Another day, another major bank adjusts its reported data based on ‘all-new’ information about regulatory probes over its market manipulation. Last week was Citi, this week it’s JPMorgan… with a double-whammy. The SEC had sanctioned 13 firms – including JPMorgan – for violating a rule primarily designed to protect retail investors.

Are the markets, and the economy, finally strong enough to stand on their own? Or, will the end of the current QE program be the start of a bigger correction? With central banks much more concerned about a return to recession than about asset-price bubbles, they have little choice but to step back in.

The solvency of the Fed itself will be questioned during the next crisis, which seems to already have begun. Either the Fed gets the markets calmed down or, the markets will begin to question the Fed’s “all-encompassing power.” When will speculators take them on? Announcement of further QE will probably do the trick.

Under the BIS Basel capital adequacy rules, government debt rated at least AA continues to carry a zero risk weighting. So banks need not set aside capital against it. With a combined position of nearly $2 trillion in US govt debt, against which they hold no capital buffer, US banks are now EXTREMELY vulnerable to a bond market sell-off.

The values of Retirement Assets are based on the Fed & US Treasury propping up the stock & bond markets since 2008. Once the U.S. Dollar-Treasury-Stock Market Dam finally bursts, it will take down the values of all these so-called paper assets. However, the opposite will occur with the value of physical gold investment.

Certainly, QE-induced perpetually rising asset prices & sinking volatility, likely boosted consumer confidence through the interpretation of lofty prices as ‘all must be well’. However, those aspects dangerously conspire to produce a false perception about the true state of economic fundamentals. Some simple questions need answers.

Policymakers have in the past always been mindful to at least talk the market out of being so blatantly one-sided as is so common for Wall Street. Get more Hawkish Yellen, & start at Jackson Hole, as bond market traders are already discounting this speech once again. In short they are taking advantage of your dovishness!

The Federal Reserve has printed well over $3,000,000,000,000 since the financial crisis of 2008 – about ten times current market value of all gold that US supposedly still has in its vaults. All the US gold, when priced in current dollars, seems rather unimportant in relation to the QE1, QE2, QE3, QE to Infinity, and “print or die” economics.

There is no way that this bubble of false prosperity in US economy was going to last forever. It was just based on a pyramid of debt & false promises. The global financial system is in far worse condition than it was just prior to the financial crisis of 2008. Here are 14 reasons why the bubble of false prosperity may be about to burst.